Risen: A Guide

March 31st, 2010, 23:33

I wrote/compiled a guide to Risen. It's 44 pages long (45 with the Table of Contents and title page) and includes everything about the game that's worth knowing. It's not just a copy/paste word dump either. I put a lot of effort into formatting the guide and arranging the information in a useful and accessible format, instead of just putting it out there. The appendix was made almost totally from scratch by me, keystroke by keystroke.

For the first time anywhere I've seen there's a clear, coherent and evaluated description of how to get yourself into the various factions. There are maps with descriptions of where to look for Ogre Roots and Hero's Crowns. There's an easy to use lockpicking cheatsheet so you don't have to savescum your way through Harbor Town each time you play. I've laid out all the plusses and minuses built in to choosing between axes, swords or staves (or Fireball, Ice Lance or Magic Bullet). There is also all of stuff you'd expect in a guide like this like a complete walkthrough, tables that list weapon stats and trainer locations, and the basics about armor.

The only thread related to this guide that I look at regularly is the one I posted at [Something Awful]. I will check in on the others (which includes this one), but don't expect quick replies from me anywhere other than the SA thread.

If you can translate the guide into another language that would be great! German, Russian and Spanish would be especially nice. Please be a native speaker in the target language if you're going to translate the guide. If you want to translate it send me an email and I can provide you with a .doc file to make things easier. When you're done I will include download links to your translation next to the English version above so that everyone can get it. My contact information is in the Introduction portion of the guide. If you're from World of Risen or Gamepressure I'd of course be honored to have my guide up on your site somewhere.

Please email me if you wish to host this guide on your site. I will generally be happy to allow you to do so unless you're going to somehow charge people to access it (in which case you're scum and won't ask me for permission anyway). Expect me to use your site as a download location in these posts if you put the file up, though I will point people to your download page, not directly to the file.

Originally Posted by Kostaz
You could use multiupload if you want a bunch of mirrors.

Looks pretty complete,there's even Console commands(!!)

Great work

I'm saving multiupload for a later version where I'm sure I've ironed out all the kinks already. The filesize and name will become more and more similar as I do new versions and the primary way free file hosts check to see if the file is already hosted is by those two things. If a filehost thinks they already have that file they won't host it, so if I do multiupload now I might not be able to use it later.

BTW I registered to post my guide on this forum as an afterthought and so far it's been by far the most responsive one. Really surprised me!

Originally Posted by Kostaz
Lots of Gothic fans here so Risen is quite popular

Now that you've got a PDF you could link the table of contents and create bookmarks.

Haha maybe in a few days. I spent about a week on this guide so I'm a little tired of fixing it now — spent half of today translating parts of those posts into German and Russian and French and whatnot and crossposting to foreign language forums in the hopes that someone will pick it up and translate it. Need a break.

But back in the day we were the 2nd biggest Gothic forum in the world. Including WoG. A lot of PB fans are still around.

I bet Myrthos would agree we host the file on our servers when it's (nearly) finished. That's more personal than a bunch of anonymous file hosters.

He may not be able to do so because, while I have reworked, rewritten and massively reorganized it, the maps and the text of the walk through are orginally from the gamepressure.com guide. Gamepressure can't really complain about some guy on the internet taking it and reworking it and offering it for free, but they might not like another site hosting it.

By the way, I did give credit to the gamepressure guide on the first page of mine. My guide, thanks to largely to better organization, much more thorough item and stat analysis, and a much better appendix, is at this point much better than the gamepressure guide — but a lot of the text in the middle portion of this is still theirs.